Griper News: Terrorism Scoring System Guarantees 2.5 Million False Positives Annually

This ain't good. Homeland Security's Automated Targeting System, which gives every traveler entering or leaving the US by air a 'terrorism score,' is pretty much guaranteed to misidentify at least 2.5 million air travelers as terrorists risks, says David Holtzman, author of Privacy Lost: How Technology Is Endangering Your Privacy, told Wired's 27B Stroke 6.

As a general statement, software is good at some things, but it doesn't take the place of subjective interpretation.

The system is not all that dissimilar from what AMEX and credit companies use to detect fraud. DHS systems are a hodgepodge, but up until now, no one has done anything with the legacy databases. Now you get put into a scoring system and if your number is high enough that means you can't leave or enter the United States.

Every year 50 to 70 million people travel across the borders and you are looking at a 2.5 million mistake number, half of which are probably Americans. I think that's almost inevitable. I've never seen an expert system do much better.

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If you fail your score, you can't travel. 27B Stroke 6 tells us, " [Holtzman's] concerned that's there's no way to contest the system's decisions or the data it relies on (the government is exempting the program from the law that lets citizens contest false data)." And, of course, our privacy is, as his book title suggests, lost.

I'm ex-intelligence, and I have appreciation for the other side. If I were the guy on the border looking how to stop a colorless, odorless deadly liquid, I'd be looking for any tool that could help. It's reasonable and appropriate to take security measures, but we also need to take precautions to guard our liberties. That second part has been dropped in favor of the former. I will bet money they are ignoring it.

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